Conventionally, an air conditioner including an occupied seat sensor that is provided at a seat inside a vehicle compartment to determine a seat occupied state is disclosed (for example, in JP Patent No. 2960243, and JP Patent No. 3573682). The air conditioner controls the blowing state of an air conditioning unit according to a signal from the occupied seat sensor.
The air conditioner in the related art includes a driver-seat side air outlet, a front-passenger-seat side air outlet, a right rear-seat side air outlet, and a left rear-seat side air outlet. The air conditioner is designed to blow out a conditioned air only from the air outlet for the seat which is determined to be occupied, and not to blow out the conditioned air from the air outlet for the seat which is determined not to be occupied by a passenger, whereby power saving is achieved.
Further, the air conditioner in the related art can introduce inside air and outside air into the air conditioning unit, and also can control the ratio of introduction of the inside air to the outside air if necessary.
In the related art, however, when a vehicle speed is increased while the outside air is introduced, the flow amount of the outside air introduced into the air conditioning unit is increased depending on a ram pressure (traveling dynamic pressure), and together with this, the flow amount of conditioned air blown into the vehicle compartment is also increased.
Thus, the conditioned air is blown only from the air outlet for the seat which is determined to be occupied, and is not blown from the air outlet for the seat which is determined not to be occupied by any passenger. In this case, the flow amount of conditioned air blown from the air outlet for the seat determined to be occupied would become excessive. In other words, the air conditioning power is concentrated on a specific passenger more than necessary, which would make the passenger feel uncomfortable.